


Denial

by kutubiyya



Series: Snapshots [1]
Category: Cricket RPF
Genre: M/M, Please Don't Hate Me, sort of an AU in which Swanderson isn't a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2332325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kutubiyya/pseuds/kutubiyya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jimmy tries to persuade himself he doesn't have (much of) a thing for Alastair Cook, and Swanny isn't helping. Set during England's tour of Australia, 2010-11.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Denial

**Author's Note:**

> This fic represents a fledging author finding her feet (and, apparently, mixing her metaphors); be nice!

Jimmy Anderson doesn’t really do denial.

Gloomy pessimism, yes. Moody bastardness, definitely. (One thing about hanging out with Swanny on a regular basis: it’s hard to ignore your annoying habits when someone’s doing impressions of them every other waking hour of the day. Of course, some of their team mates try, even so.)

Jimmy can be – on occasion – a grumpy sod. But he isn’t stupid.

He can’t deny what he’s feeling. He’s been attracted to enough people over the years to know what it means when you always know where someone is in a room. What it means when you can’t stop sneaking glances at them, when you’re distracted every time they walk past you, when you make excuses to let yourself watch them.

Mostly he gets this around his wife, these days, but overseas tours are long and eyes wander; nothing wrong with looking, and enjoying, so long as you don’t act on it.

And, well, you keep it under control. He’s no stranger to Homer’s panicked line from that Simpsons episode: _think unsexy thoughts think unsexy thoughts_.

Of course, usually the someones he’s trying to think unsexy thoughts about are women. Not men, not for a long time.

 _A_ man. Alastair Cook.

The most beautiful man alive is in the nets, not twenty feet from where he’s sitting. Pads strapped to bare (tanned, toned) legs, not even a hint of sweat on face or arms despite the Aussie sun beating down – sometimes he wonders if the man is even human – and dark blue shorts leaving just enough to the imagination that whenever he bends over to take guard, Jimmy catches his breath and feels a warmth coiling below his belly. He finds himself thinking about cricket pads in a way he never has before, pondering the possibilities offered by restricted movement and—

( _think unsexy thoughts think unsexy thoughts_ )

Long tour. Second Test tomorrow. Then home for a few days, to see his wife and become a dad for the second time.

Ali hits a cover drive with the full face of the bat. He holds the pose for a moment, then mimes a couple of other strokes while he waits for the next delivery. There’s a certain amount of bending and twisting, tightening shorts in several enjoyable ways.

(Jimmy’s own shorts, embarrassingly, start to feel rather tight. He knows exactly what that means, too. He really, really needs to focus on something else.)

Hands slam down on his shoulders so abruptly he yelps, and nearly leaps out of his chair. What can only be described as cackling filled his ears.

Jimmy relaxes at the familiar sound, gathers himself, and squints into the glare of sunlight behind him to see, of course, Swanny’s pink-cheeked face wearing a smug grin. No sign of Barney and the camera for once, thank god.

“You were _miles_ away!”

Jimmy nods towards the nets, and manages to mutter, “Batting masterclass,” before turning back, worried something in his expression might give him away.

Swanny snorts, moving to pull a plastic chair up next to him. “It was only two hundred and thirty-five not out, it’s not like— Mr _And_ erson!” The mock leer in his voice makes Jimmy look back at him, to see a smirk and Swanny’s nod towards his crotch. “Getting frisky?”

Jimmy feels his face heat up. And to think he was worried about his _expression_ giving him away.

He stares as hard as he can at his trainers. “Oh. Just.” He swallows. “Y’know, thinking about Daniella.” (Which, strictly speaking, is true. Sort of.)

Swanny chuckles easily as he sits down, reaching over to give Jimmy a couple of hearty pats to the thigh. “God, yeah: the closer you are to seeing them, the harder it gets.”

A beat, then Swanny’s guffawing with laughter at his own joke, loudly enough that Ali pauses mid-drive and looks round with a quizzical smile brightening those all-too-perfect features.

Normally, Jimmy would be mocking Swanny about fake spontaneous puns that he clearly prepares in advance. But right now he’s too busy trying not to wince at the way Swanny’s pats have jiggled his leg, and what that, in turn, has done to other parts of him. And, oh crap, now Ali’s heading over, all cheerful and blissfully innocent of the fact that his star seam-bowling teammate has just spent the past fifteen minutes idly imagining pinning him against a wall and tearing those shorts right off.

“All right, Cooky?” he calls out, and if his voice is maybe just a shade too high-pitched, well, that’s fine, isn’t it? Jimmy and Swanny, messing around again, like they always do.

Nothing to see here. Nothing at all.

( _think unsexy thoughts think unsexy thoughts_ )

Jimmy doesn’t do denial. Much.

\--

Jimmy sits up, folds his waste-of-space business class pillow in half with sharp, irritable movements, and throws himself back down to the narrow excuse for a bed.

Nothing worse than not being able to sleep on a flight down under. Nothing worse. Third Test on the horizon and he's going to be out for fucking _days_ with jetlag.

It’s not really the bed’s fault, if he’s honest. He can’t shut his brain up.

It’s been a great break at home, waiting on his sleepily beautiful wife hand and foot, losing himself in wonder every time he gazes at his newborn daughter with her tiny perfect hands and her tiny perfect nose and her massive ear-shattering demands to be fed.

But now he’s flying back through a day and a night to rejoin his team-mates for the third Test in Perth, and he can’t stop the feeling like the sun rising in his chest at the thought of seeing Ali again.

And with that feeling, comes the guilt.

His mates back home see a very clear dividing line separating ‘married with kids’ from Canal Street, but Jimmy doesn’t. It’s one of the reasons why he agreed to do the shoot for _Attitude_ in the summer; big gay tea party and all that. He knew it isn’t that simple, because the line he’s walked hasn’t been entirely straight, for as long as he can remember.

But being bi doesn’t mean you can’t be faithful. It doesn’t (have to) mean being head over heels for a specific woman and deeply in lust with a specific man at the same time, so much so that you can’t separate out your feelings for each of them, or see any way through the bloody maze of it all.

Some days he shrugs and tells himself it’s just complicated, and doesn’t matter anyway because nothing can ever happen. He’s just looking; looking never harmed anyone.

Okay, so he and Swanny have brought the bromance to the England dressing room, making it a standard and comfortable part of the banter to hug, flirt, and one-up each other with tributes to Broady’s prettiness. But there’s a massive difference between joking around and actually saying (feeling) something real. If anything, it makes it harder; on the one occasion Jimmy cast a vaguely smouldering look in Ali’s direction, Cooky laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.

Everyone knows, after all, that Swanny and Jimmy piss about with things like that all the time; everyone is in on the joke. Practically the entire squad lined up to declare they’d marry Broady for that Twelfth Man video in the summer. Even him. (He knew everyone else was saying Broady, and played it safe, though he couldn’t keep a betraying squeak out of his voice. Couldn’t risk saying “Cooky” on camera, afraid of what it might reveal, even to himself. Swanny got in a mood with him for that, for not picking him.)

So yeah, some days he tells himself it isn’t a problem; it does no-one any harm if he pines for his beautiful team-mate a bit (a lot). But other days, he berates himself (never mind _nothing can happen_ , what about _nothing should happen_?), wondering when he became the sort of man who fantasises about cheating on his wife. Knowing that this is more than just looking. That he wants, sometimes so fiercely he forgets how to breathe.

He rolls onto his left side. He lies flat on his back. Right side. Left side. Right side. Back.

_Fuck it._

He gives up on sleep, reaching for his carry-on and pulling out his laptop. Swanny’s emailed part five of the Ashes video diary, and he downloaded it just before he left home. Now seems as good a time as any to watch; better than going round in circles, not sleeping. Plus, the first thing Swanny’ll do when he lands is barrage him with questions about it. Swanny wants his approval, and Jimmy knows he can rely on him for some distraction. Sticking in his headphones, Jimmy hits play.

Before long, he’s stifling a snort at Swanny hauling himself to the top of the MCG, then smiling fondly as the spinner explains his need for a new sidekick in Jimmy’s absence.

 _Tart_ , he thinks, _I’m barely away a few days—_

He kills that line of thought – much too uncomfortable, in the circumstances – about half a second before bam: Ali’s absurdly triangular jaw and huge dark eyes are filling the screen in front of him.

Jimmy’s heart skips and he’s scrambling to minimise the window before he’s even realised what he’s doing. He casts covert glances around the cabin, trying to work out if anyone’s seen, feeling for all the world like a teenager almost caught watching porn by his mum.

All his fellow passengers look to be asleep. He forces his breathing to steady, tapping his fingers against the side of the laptop, resisting temptation for all of thirty seconds before he gives in.

Wind back. Play.

There’s Ali, gazing back at him – or rather at Swanny, who’s urging Ali from behind the camera to give him his most miserable look. Jimmy chuckles at Ali’s half-arsed effort: he’s a bashful lad, is Ali, he doesn’t glory in attention like Swanny does (or like he himself is starting to, thanks to Swanny).

But video-Swanny isn’t content. “No, come on,” he says, camera still trained on Ali. “ _Jimmy_ miserable.”

Which produces a pout of impressive proportions – those lips, between those cheekbones and that jaw (some people might call the whole effect ‘sculpted’, but Jimmy’s pretty sure he isn’t that kind of man) – coupled a moment later with the knock-out blow: his face tilted downwards, Ali turns a half-sullen, half-appealing, bordering-on-come-hither look back up at the camera.

Heat shoots straight for his groin. _Oh god oh god._

Jimmy would put the laptop away for real this time, but right now it’s the only thing protecting his remaining shreds of dignity. _Oh fuck._

Another furtive scan of the cabin. Guilt battles hunger, and the latter wins hands down. Jimmy drags the cursor back, watches the moment again. His cock throbs. He realises suddenly that some of his favourite mental images of Ali zero in on his mouth: his head thrown back with helpless laughter at some line of Swanny’s, uninhibited, the line of that jaw, lips parted and wide mouth open like something you could just fill—

So much for fucking distraction. ( _Ha_.)

It’s a while before he can see the video clearly again. He tunes back in as Swanny mocks Finny’s hair – again – and is just starting to feel he’s recovered a bit when up pops bloody Ali again. Starting to take his shirt off for the camera _what the fuck am I actually dreaming now_ —

Swanny stops him, the bastard. (Is it just him, or does Ali look a bit disappointed?)

Not that Jimmy hasn’t seen that perfect chest before, but this is different, a striptease in the offing. An insistent voice in his head is saying: imagine having it on video. Imagine watching it whenever you like.

He shakes his head at himself; he’s a dirty old man, is what he is. Then video-Ali is smoothing his shirt down to show off a nipple and Jimmy groans and slams the laptop closed before he can see any more. If he didn’t know better – if he wasn’t absolutely certain his secret is, well, secret – he’d think Swanny has done this deliberately. He collapses back down against his pillow, and lies there staring at the grey shadows of the cabin ceiling, breathing like he’s just legged it all the way from gully to deep extra cover.

And still not managed to stop the ball before it hit the boundary rope.


End file.
